This year Fender is celebrating the 75th anniversary of the Telecaster, and Nashville was chosen to host the Tele Town birthday party.
I arrive in Nashville from Perth after three flights and around 35 hours, which involve the guy in the row in front of me on the Perth-to-Sydney leg vomiting uncontrollably for half the flight, then an unscheduled and unwanted seven-hour layover in LAX, all accompanied by very little sleep.
After a much-needed shower and dinner, I find myself nursing a beer in Robert’s Western World, one of the last remaining genuine honky tonks on Broadway. The trio ripping it up onstage is Kelley’s Heroes, and they’re something of an institution, playing here four nights a week, and evolving from the decades-long mentorship of Broadway icon Don Kelley, who has now retired.
On lead guitar is Luke McQueary, a smiley guy in his mid-twenties who can cluck like Buck Owens, wail like James Burton, jab like Steve Cropper, and sound like a train whistle, a siren, a dive-bomber, and just about anything else he desires.
Robert’s is not a big place, but it’s packed to the gills and rowdy. The following night I see McQueary play again in very different circumstances, this time in front of over 2,000 people on the most sacred stage in Nashville, the Ryman Auditorium, the co-called Mother Church Of Country Music.
He’s there for a night called Tele Town, alongside legends including Jack White, Brad Paisley, Billy Gibbons, Ricky Skaggs, Brent Mason and Tommy Emmanuel, and younger axe-slingers such as Larkin Poe, Brothers Osborne and Christone “Kingfish” Ingram.
These players have one thing in common. They all play Fender Telecasters, the guitar that's having its 75th anniversary this year. That’s the reason I’m here. Nashville has transformed itself into Tele Town, as a celebration of the beloved and enduring instrument Leo Fender dreamed up in 1951.
Turns out that Edward "Bud" Cole, the newly installed Fender CEO, after previously serving for over a decade as Fender President of Asia Pacific, has a long association with the Telecaster that predates his time with the company. His very first electric guitar was a 1969 Fender Thinline Telecaster he bought at a Guitar Center in 1988. He still owns it, still loves it, and still plays it onstage with a band. And he’s still amazed that Leo Fender, an engineer who didn’t play guitar himself, created the Telecaster in 1951 and pretty much hit it out of the park.
"You think about that time, in the early 1950s, and electric guitars were big hollow-bodied instruments, and anything new was just an evolution from that," says Cole, sitting in a conference room at Fender’s offices in East Nashville. "Whereas Leo thought, ‘I’m going to take a quantum leap here and I’m going to create a totally new electric guitar.’ It wasn’t an evolution, it was starting from a blank space, and he threw away the playbook.
"He created something that was simple, that he could mass produce, that didn’t have feedback problems. The Telecaster was an instrument where you could change the pickups, you could take off the neck, and most importantly you could bring your own playing style to it. He created something that is timeless."
Because it was so different to what everyone thought of as an electric guitar, in the beginning it received its fair share of criticism, and even ridicule.
"They called it things like The Plank and The Boat Paddle and The Snow Shovel," says Cole. "But real working musicians took it out on the road and realized it could survive the long drives and the drops and playing it night after night. It met the reality of life on the road.
"And the reason we’re sitting here in Nashville right now is because it’s a city that embraced and defined the Telecaster. We owe a debt to them because they showed all these other genres what the guitar could do, and that’s why we’re celebrating the Telecaster here."
Also in this building is the research and development floor and an artists’ showroom, where well-known musicians can come in to discuss signature models, try out new innovations and even jam together.
I sit down in one of the offices with Justin Norvell, Fender Chief Product Officer, and ask him about why he thinks the Telecaster is an instrument that has translated so well to so many different genres of music. You couldn’t get guitarists as different to each other as Albert Collins, Keith Richards, Joe Strummer, Bruce Springsteen, Prince and Jonny Greenwood – yet they all famously use(d) Telecasters.
"I think it’s because the Telecaster is so simple," says Norvell. "So 50 percent is the sound of the guitar and 50 percent is the sound of the player. It’s this solid body with two pickups, which leaves it a lot of headroom to shapeshift as music changes."
But if Leo Fender got it so right in 1951, doesn’t that present a problem for Fender? How do they come up with new twists on the same guitar?
"It’s evolution, not revolution," says Norvell. "We’re definitely not changing the shape or reinventing the guitar. We like to say that we’re coloring between the lines. But there’s always room to innovate and to add refinements, whether that’s advanced pickup design, trying new materials, experimenting with colors and finishes, or making a better playing instrument."
Case in point is the latest range of 75th anniversary models. There are five of them, all riffing on the classic ’50s Tele, and, as Norvell would say, “coloring between the lines.” The series rocks out as the Vintera Road Worn 1951 model with authentic vintage specs; the American Professional Custom with two-tone sunburst finish and V-Mod pickups; the American Ultra II with Liquid Gold finish and a combination of a Noiseless Single Coil and a Fastlane humbucker; the American Professional Classic Cabronita with TV Jones pickups; and the Player II with Diamond Dust Sparkle finish and Thunderbolt pickups.
Despite the upgrades, there’s also a strong sense that this year Fender is honoring the original guitars and the old guard who pioneered them. At the Tele Town concert, James Burton, whose distinctive playing on his signature paisley Telecaster has fueled the music of everyone from Elvis Presley to Elvis Costello, was brought onto the stage and received rapturous applause.
The evening’s host, Zack Childs, described him as a man who "has played the Telecaster for at least 74 of the 75 years it’s been around."
The 86-year-old was obviously in frail health, and he sat there Sphinx-like in baseball cap and sunglasses, soaking it in, while the performers from the night paid homage and lined up for an all-star jam finale – every one of them playing a Telecaster.
Earlier, when John Oates walked onstage to duet with Guthrie Trapp, he greeted the crowd with the words, "Did you get enough Telecaster yet?"
The response was a loud and resounding "No!"
The Tele lives on.
